LOS ANGELES -- Someday someone is going to write a scholarly book about the films of Clint Eastwood, and go plumbing about down there in the depths of his psyche, looking for clues. There may be some interesting discoveries. It's a tricky business, analyzing the obsessions and longings of most movie stars, because they don't generate their own movies; examine their careers and what you'll really discover is what their directors thought about them. The late Cary Grant, for example, remains an enigma despite all of the words written about him; he buried his original self so deep inside that he was even able to joke about how he became the characters that he played.

“There wasn't any one single horrendous event,” Kim Darby was saying, thinking aloud. “And I never said to myself, all right, I'm going to drop out. It just sort of happened more naturally. I decided to stop running from here to there, and sit down with myself and do a little thinking. You know what I wanted to do? I wanted to wear myself better.”